My 2nd Rock concert EVER

On Sunday night I went to my 2nd concert ever. I think the first one was Pearl Jam with my friend Jen in Utah. How sad is that. I don't even remember who it was. We saw the Counting Crows & Maroon 5. A couple of weeks ago I heard on the radio there was a promotion and that for one day only tickets were $10. We bought tickets for us, Heath's older brother Chris and his wife Tara, and his younger brother Colt. It was in an outdoor amphitheatre in Auburn. We started out on the lawn in the back because we thought it would be nice to eat our dinner and be spread out from other people, and then it started raining. We quickly moved to our covered reserved seats. We went mostly to see Augustana (who opened) and Counting Crows. It was really neat because towards the end when the Crows were playing they had the whole Augustana band come on stage and sing a couple songs together. Maroon 5 was ok, I liked some of their more popular songs. It was cold & we got rained on, but we had a lot of Fun.

Falling Asleep to the Sounds of the Ocean

I had Monday off work, so on Sunday morning we packed up our backpacks and drove to La Push, WA. It is right on the coast by the Olympic Peninsula National Park. It took about 4 hours by ferry and driving. We first stopped off at Rialto Beach. We climbed over HUGE trees that were stacked on a small strip of beach that led out to this big rock.
At the bottom of the rock we found some tide pools filled with starfish.


Next we drove to Second Beach. We had to backpack in for about 3/4 a mile through the forest. It was a beautiful day, about 80 degrees and not a cloud in the sky. We set up our tent and chairs and just sat and relaxed while staring at the ocean.

We started a fire and cooked our Yummy dry packed food. It really was pretty good. We had lasagna and Raspberry Crumble for dessert.
We watched a beautiful sunset and fell asleep under a full moon with the whole beach to ourselves. This was our view from the tent.
The next morning we went exploring and discovered we didn't have the whole beach to ourselves, but the other people were so far from us we didn't even know they were there. It was an awesome weekend just Heath & I relaxing with 3 of our favorite things: the ocean, camping, and each other.

Japanese Gardens

On Labor Day Heath & I went to some Japanese Gardens. The first one is in the University of Washington Arboretum. It was fairly small, but very beautiful. They had a pond full of turtles and Koi fish. The fish must be fed well, because they were the biggest Koi fish I have ever seen. The second garden, Kubota Gardens was south of the city. As we drove there we started to wonder what it was going to look like because it was located in a bad area. We were pleasantly surprised. It was big, fairly clean, and not so Japanese. I think they continue to call it a Japanese garden because it was started by a Japanese man & his son in 1923. During the Second World War the garden was abandoned for 4 years when the family was forced to live in an internment camp in Idaho. The city eventually named the garden a Historical Landmark and is now free to the public. It is a great park with lots of trees, open grassy areas, and really pretty flowers.